Preface

Oracle Streams Concepts and Administration describes the features and functionality of Streams. This document contains conceptual information about Streams, along with information about managing a Streams environment. In addition, this document contains detailed examples that configure a Streams capture and apply environment and a rule-based application.

Audience

Oracle Streams Concepts and Administration is intended for database administrators who create and maintain Streams environments. These administrators perform one or more of the following tasks:

Plan for a Streams environment

Configure a Streams environment

Administer a Streams environment

Monitor a Streams environment

Perform necessary troubleshooting activities

To use this document, you need to be familiar with relational database concepts, SQL, distributed database administration, Advanced Queuing concepts, PL/SQL, and the operating systems under which you run a Streams environment.

Contains conceptual information about the Streams capture process. Includes information about logical change records (LCRs), datatypes and types of changes captured, and supplemental logging, along with information about capture process architecture.

Contains conceptual information about staging and propagation in a Streams environment. Includes information about the differences between captured and user-enqueued events, propagation, the differences between transactional and non-transactional queues, and using SYS.AnyData queues. Also includes information about queue and propagation architecture.

Contains conceptual information about the Streams apply process. Includes information about event processing with an apply process, considerations for apply changes to tables, conditions for applying DDL changes, and controlling a trigger's firing property, along with information about the oldest SCN for an apply process and apply process architecture.

Contains conceptual information about how rules are used in Streams. Includes information about table rules, subset rules, schema rules, and global rules. Also includes information about rule-based transformations.

Contains information about preparing for a Streams environment. Includes instructions for configuring a Streams administrator, setting initialization parameters that are important to Streams, preparing for a capture process, and configuring networking connectivity.

Contains information about managing a capture process. Includes instructions for creating, starting, stopping, and altering a capture process, as well as other information related to capture process administration.

Contains information about managing staging and propagation of events in a Streams environment. Includes instructions for creating a SYS.AnyData queue, and instructions for enabling, disabling, and altering a propagation, as well as other information related to staging, propagation, and messaging.

Contains information about managing an apply process. Includes instructions for creating, starting, stopping, and altering an apply process, as well as instructions about using apply process handlers, configuring conflict resolution, and managing an exception queue.

Contains information about managing rules and rule-based transformations. Includes instructions for managing rules and rule sets, as well as information about granting and revoking privileges related to rules. In addition, this chapter includes instructions for creating, altering, and removing rule-based transformations.

Contains information about managing logical change records (LCRs) and Streams tags. Includes instructions for constructing and enqueuing LCRs, and instructions for setting and removing tag values for a session or an apply process.

Contains information about possible problems in a Streams environment and how to resolve them. Includes information about troubleshooting a capture process, propagation, apply process, messaging client, and the rules used by these Streams clients, as well as information about checking trace files and the alert log for problems.

Contains a step by step example that configures a single database capture and apply example using Streams. Specifically, this chapter illustrates an example of a single database that captures changes to a table, uses a DML handler during apply to re-enqueue the captured changes into a queue, and then applies a subset of the changes to a different table.

Contains information about performing certain maintenance operations on an Oracle database with little or no down time. These maintenance operations include upgrading to a new version of the Oracle Database, migrating an Oracle Database to a different operating system or character set, upgrading user-created applications, and applying Oracle Database patches.

You may find more information about a particular topic in the other documents in the Oracle documentation set.

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Many of the examples in this book use the sample schemas of the seed database, which is installed by default when you install Oracle. Refer to Oracle Database Sample Schemas for information on how these schemas were created and how you can use them yourself.

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